short read while reading block

[Hmse]

I have a hard drive that I've been suspicious of for a while now. Several times I've hadd it randomly spout out kernel panics and such, requiring me to reformat it. Now I've replaced the drive and am attempting to retrieve the data from it, however when I attempt to mount the drive I get:
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdb1,
missing codepage or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

And as the drive/partition/mount point is configured exactly as it was when it was working, I decided to do an fsck. However I was given this:
root@slc-desktop:/home/sarah-lambert# fsck.ext3 -c /dev/hdb1
e2fsck 1.39 (29-May-2006)
/dev/hdb1: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while reading block 522

/dev/hdb1: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read reading journal superblock

fsck.ext3: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while checking ext3 journal for /dev/hdb1

And I get this same thing no matter what fsck options I choose to run.
Now I was also curious to see if I could get around this by resizing the drive in gparted and bypassing the bad block, but gparted gave me the exact same error--Attempted to read . . . blah blah blah.

I've done google searching but have found nothing. Anyone able to lend their superior expertise?

[dkeav]

looks to me like you have a bad drive and or cable, you might try recovering your data with testdisk and photorec

[retsaw]

You might have some luck if you copy the partitions to another hard drive using dd_rescue. It worked for me when I had a defective SATA disk that I couldn't mount the partitions on.